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How to teach yourself to learn a new language or technology
Sometimes, I think about other industry. Imagine, someone wants to be a surgeon, they’ll have to study around 10 years after high school so they can actually perfom a surgery. But for developers, that’s not true. Once we understand how computer works or how to use a programming language. We can start doing whatever we want, the tools we use are free, the knowledge we need are available online. Some people just got tired of using existing libraries, or someone might want to improve or create a new one.
Because of that reason, many libraries/frameworks constantly come out, the technologies are rapidly changing. But look, the libraries/frameworks you use 10-15 years ago are no longer being used, you will have to work with the modern framework, and if you have experience with it, it’s going to make you become a better developer. The choice to learn is completely up to you.
How fast is technology changing? It depends on what field you are working with. If you are working with C/C++, Java or Perl, these technologies evolve slowly compared to front-end technologies, because things change quite fast.
Some keys thing when you learn
- Fundamental knowledge
- Information knowledge
Fundamental knowledge
These are the fundamental knowledge, the very basic concepts of understanding that will be helpful for future learning. For instance, OOP (Object-Oriented Programming), callback, asynchronous programming, loop, recursion, data structures, desgin patterns, etc.
These knowledge mostly involve theoretical understanding so some people might get bored when they hear phrases like pointer, binary tree, events, stack, heap, etc.
However, if you get all of these basic concept, you life will become a lot easier. Because every language/technologies follow the same basic principle of knowledge. For example, if you understanding the MVC architecture, know how GET/POST request help to communicate between server and client, you can easily learn other framework such as Laravel in PHP, Struts in Java or ASP.NET in C#.
You can't run if you didn't learn how to walk. You can't just go straight to year 12 by skipping from year 1 to 11
Information knowledge
Before you move to this stage, you need to understand the fundamental concept. If somehow you get the program working but barely understand how it works or you get errors and have no idea what cause it, there is high chance that you lack of fundamental knowledge. But that’s fine, you’re still learning.
Most online courses or programming tutorial or whatever you call it. They mainly focus on information knowledge, and skip fundamental knowledge. You can get a job easier than other people but as time goes on, you will eventually notice that you’re falling behind because there is a huge gap in your knowledge. And trust me, no one wants to be in that position, they just blindly choose the wrong path.
Usually information knowledge involves task such as working with small libraries,
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